Hacker News Reader

Comment by nologic01 | Hacker News Reader

Money is a social invention, it can never be apolitical. It very much reflects societal structure and contracts, explicit or implicit.

This (very early / prescient) critique of bitcoin is not casting a harsh enough light on the inadequacy of its design.

But maybe now that the concept of designed and programmable money is on the table people can think of what type of monetary/credit system befits a good society.

Bitcoin it aint and out bizarre private bank money perennially backed by the collective it aint either.

View on HN

A lot of cryptography is based on non repudiation, while contract law is built on repudiation. Trading goods for services or even other goods is an implicit or explicit contract.

The people who think cryptocurrency is only for crime are partially right, but not strictly for the reasons they think. Less drugs and more fraud.

cryptography is based on non repudiation, but cryptocurrency is just human-written codebases. You can very much fork/modify/influence/introduce bugs in/backdoor/etc. code. It fails to promote cryptography's qualities to a higher sphere, as the more cryptocurrencies become harmful to society, the more they become governed by contract law. This has been the trend for the last decade, at least.

Handing over some bank notes also has the property of "non-repudiation" but that doesn't mean that just because I paid you in cash you get necessarily get away with not upholding your end of our agreement. Bank transfers also have this "non-repudiation" property in practice as well. That hasn't stopped us from using them for payment while also enforcing the terms of contracts.

> Bank transfers also have this "non-repudiation" property in practice as well.

No and that's a nasty, nasty surprise when you find out it's not true. There are plenty of ways for big bank customers to claw back payments made to private individuals, long after you or I would consider the transaction settled. And people get in trouble with their banks when they've spent the money and reversing the charges results in your accounts being overdrawn. The closest thing you have to this power is Visa, which is why the little Robin Hood in my head makes me encourage people to use it whenever they can.

There's the old saying, "I'll believe it when I see it."

There's a cheeky variant, "I'll believe it when the check clears."

There's the experienced, "I'll believe it ten days after the check clears."

And there's the jaded, "I'll believe it 30 days after the check clears."

Yeah, it cuts both ways. I have a friend who lost $2M through a business email compromise. In practice it might as well have been bitcoin, all of that "the banks can just reverse it" is just not true. All of those thefts just become an issue of insurance, if you have coverage for that sort of thing.

With crypto I guess at least you know for sure where you stand.

reflects -> enforces

I suspect you need to create a good society first and then decide on a resource/status hierarchy system for it. Trying to do it the other way around is unlikely to work.

Bitcoin was always financial libertarianism. No accountability, no records, and - most of all, but only potentially - no taxes.

Inevitably it turned into Ground Zero for anyone with a scam to upsell.

How is the block chain "no records" tho? Isn't it an immutable chain of records that inexorably identifies and documents ownership and transactions?

Magic thinking, that’s how.

More like boogeyman thinking.

Laundering money through mixers is a big part of coin culture.

> Money is a social invention, it can never be apolitical.

Seems like the good old "everything is political" argument.

and if everything is political, nothing is political?

but politics is just what happens when power interacts in a social context!

...and everything IS social

Yes, it's just not what we mean when we say Bitcoin is apolitical. What we mean is that it's not subject to political influence nor does it require government to operate. In contrast to fiat money.

Bitcoin literally uses voting to on which branch to use as it's consensus tie break mechanism. It depends on the value of the network incentivizing people to vote in a way that keeps the network trustworthy. I don't know if you can get more overtly political than that.

Is voting inherently political? Are leader election algorithms political?

If the voters are humans (or computers instructed by humans, which simplifies to the same thing) then obviously yes.

If voting is not political, you'll have to present your definition of "political", as you're using an abnormal definition.

> Merriam-Webster: The meaning of political is of or relating to government, a government, or the conduct of government.

Also, there is no such "voting on which branch to use", I'm not sure what you are referring to or if you're mixed up with another cryptocurrency. In Bitcoin, the valid branch is the one with the most proof of work. There is no concept of voting.

You vote for consensus rules with your node. A chain with more proof of work, but that is violating the rules that nodes have formed consensus on, is ignored.

> You vote for consensus rules with your node.

That's incorrect. Non-mining nodes are passive, they do not cast votes.

> A chain with more proof of work, but that is violating the rules that nodes have formed consensus on, is ignored.

That is correct. Non-mining nodes are programmed to reject invalid blocks... or they can accept them if they want. It's of no importance because what they do has no influence on the rest of the network.

> That's incorrect. Non-mining nodes are passive, they do not cast votes.

Well you're right in that it doesn't look like casting a ballot in a box, but in practice they very much do "vote" in the sense that they decide on what rules are valid or not. This is what prevents miners from colluding and changing the rules of Bitcoin, the nodes would reject their chain. This is also what prevents developers from introducing a backdoor into the network by releasing malicious code. Node operators can vote to reject a change by not upgrading their nodes.

Inversely, if there is a rule change and the nodes of the network go along with the rule change (by their decision on what to reject or accept), then this is akin to a motion passing. The validity of blocks is not some ethereal thing, and neither are Bitcoin rules written on stone tablets by God. These things are the result of very human deliberation and code commits (by humans).

Well, now we've reached the "every decision is a vote" argument. Is HTML political because browsers reject malformed HTML? When my browser refuses to render a page, does it "vote"? When I am watching a movie, am I voting against TV?

> very much do "vote" in the sense that they decide on what rules are valid or not.

Yes, they decide for themselves. Their decision is irrelevant and ignored by the network, at protocol level. It doesn't prevent anyone from running modified versions of Bitcoin (in fact, there are tons of those running as we speak). Nor does it prevent miners from mining invalid blocks.

> The validity of blocks is not some ethereal thing, and neither are Bitcoin rules written on a tablet by God.

They are, more or less. I think the last time a hard fork occurred was over 10 years ago for a small bug fix.

Like I was saying, your argument is basically that "everything is political". You are using "vote" in the most abstract and metaphorical sense. Yes, people "vote" for Bitcoin by using it. Just like I'm "voting" for HN by commenting here. That's just not how people typically think of "voting" and "politics". That "vote" has very little in common with the traditional "vote" that is counted and used to reach a decision.

We'll have to disagree. My observation is that nodes have, historically (see 2017), been used as a way to decide which miners were mining "Bitcoin" and which miners were mining "some other thing". The whole point made by Core developers was that "proof of work does not equal consensus if your policy is invalid, and what is valid is what is accepted by all these nodes".

As such and unlike your TV and browser, nodes have been used to influence policy, so I reject your "everything is political" straw man.

There are many forks of Bitcoin, like Bitcoin Cash or BSV. When core developers suggest "what is valid is what is accepted by all these nodes," they're referring to the fact that nodes ultimately determine which cryptocurrency they acknowledge as valid for transactions. This could range from Bitcoin, its various forks, to even Ethereum and beyond. It's not a part of the protocol itself but a kind of very metaphorical vote, akin to how you "vote" for Canadian dollars by accepting them as a form of payment.

> nodes have been used to influence policy

Which policy are we referring to? There is no centralized authority here. Each participant has the autonomy to decide which blockchain to support. If a Bitcoin fork appeals to you, you're free to use it. The only semblance of "politics" that emerges is the debate over semantics, the "true Bitcoin," but this isn't dictated by the protocol. It evolves in a decentralized and organic manner, devoid of any formal political process or voting.

It bears very little resemblance with typical notions of voting and politics. It's only political in the broadest sense of the term, when starting from the axiom "anything involving humans is political". Which dilutes the significance of the term 'political' - a trend that I personally find very irritating, hence my initial snarky comment.

> Which policy are we referring to?

* BIP 141 version bits and BIP 148 as a voting mechanism: https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0141.mediawi... and https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0148.mediawi...

* core developer votes: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Segwit_support

* posturing and maneuvering: https://cointelegraph.com/news/samourai-wallet-intends-to-ru...

> It evolves in a decentralized and organic manner, devoid of any formal political process or voting.

Just because the voting mechanisms are generally informal if we exclude the formal BIP voting process, that doesn't make them not voting mechanisms. I'll grant you that the politics of Bitcoin can be chaotic and hard to follow (this is intentional), but in times of crisis, the obfuscated leadership structure usually emerges from the darkness. Another example is what happened in the 2013 crisis, where light was cast on where the power in Bitcoin truly lied: https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2015/07/28/analyzing-the-2013-... . In this example, a couple devs took charge and had the miners abandon the longest chain.

If all these things are not politics to you, in that they are not specifically about governance, power, or voting, again we'll have to disagree. I am definitely not saying "everything human is political" so again we can drop that straw man.

It isn't voting in the usual sense because preferences don't come into it. Nodes follow the "longest" chain and if there's a tie they use a simple heuristic to break it.

This is not correct, nodes follow the longest valid chain. The word valid is key, and therein lie the politics.

Sure, you can fork but IMO that's akin to secession or revolution, not voting.

Well, which chain is the fork? Who's rules are you using as the arbiter? What kind of node you run and what it outputs has a direct effect on what is perceived as being "Bitcoin", as opposed to "a fork of Bitcoin". Humans are the final arbiter of which one is the fork, whether it's by the nodes they run or by the code they decide to merge into the core repo (sometimes after much very political deliberation).

I mean, if there's one thing I'd call political without mentioning literal politics, it's the economy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com